




B» 








Book ^\>t£_ 



VINDICATION OF THE UNION. 



SPEECH 



HON. JOSEPH SEGAR 



FIRST CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT OF VIRQINU., 



BBFOBS -THS 



UNION MEETING IN PORTSMOUTH, VA., 

ON SATURDAY, MAY 31, 1862. 
( f^om report of Philadelphia Inquirer, ) 

— ' * t "leeT;: 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 
PRINTED BY W. H. MOORE. 

1862. 






^ 



SPEECH. 



When [ last trod the streets of Portsmouth, our country was at peace, and the 
people of this whole land were the most blessed on the face of the globe. The storm 
of commercial revulsion which had swept over the land iu 1857, had lulled, and under 
the influence of bountiful crops and the recuperative energies of our people, the coun- 
try had reached a point of prosperity it had never known before. The whole land 
bloomed. The plough was sped, the loom rattled, the anvil rang, I'nd commerce 
rejoiced. Plenty smiled over thirty-two millions of contented and happy people. 
But, oh God! liow chaus^'ed the scene ! '-Wild war's deadly blast is blowing," and 
has carried desolation to every interest, and every fireside, within our State. 

We are not only involved in war, but in civil war — a war which has ruptured all 
the ties of kindred and blood, and brought in hostile meeting, on, the same battle 
field, father and son, and brother and brother. Our trade is gone ; the grass grows greeu 
and high in the streets of our cities ; the millions of trade we once had with the North, 
and which gave thrift and comfort, and even subsistence, to so many of our people, has 
perished ; our whole people, from the stripling lad to the hoary head, have gone to 
the tented field; the price of even the necessaries of life are insufferably high; and 
the working men iind the poor men of every cla.ss are at starvation s point. Who did 
all this? Whose mighty sin is it? Our secession friends say it rests upon us, the 
Union men — that we, who have stood by the stars and stripes, are responsible — that, 
by a certain sacred principle of State rights, we ought to have followed our State into 
secession, or whithersoever else she called us — that we are traitors to our State, be- 
cause we would do it not — and that, by not making common cause against the vile Yan- 
kees, (who, in my judgment, had done them no material wrong.) we were playing into 
the hands of the enemies of the South, and that thus we are responsible for this ruinous 
war. I am here to deny the charge, and to disprove it. No part of the mountain- 
load guilt of breaking up our glorious Union is ours. We are 7iot traitors. 1 have 
been so denounced a thousand and twice a thousand times, but I vow I am no traitor. 
The treason is theirs, who, by secession, have thrown down the pillars of the American 
Union; and their treason is a double one —treason to their State and treason to th« 
Supreme Gorernmenl ofthf- Mnii.u. 



. Vt'e hava obeyed our State ; they have not. We have been true both to our State 
and the Union, for we hold that loyaltj' to the Union is no disloyalty to our State. 
That htate hersdf, when she ratified the Federal Constitution, and became a party to 
the great compact of Union, bound herself by each and every one of its provisions, and 
commanded all her citizens to adopt this Constitution as a rule of political conduct — 
not only as a rule, but a supreme rule. She said to me, and she said to you : " Here is 
this Constitution, made by Washington, and Fraxklin, and Madison ; take it for your 
guide — obey it — stand by it — anything in my Constitution or laws to the contrary 
notwithstanding ; which, being interpreted, meaneth this, and this only — that when 
the Constitution and laws of the Federal Government come in clash with my Consti- 
tution and my laws, mine must give way, and those of the supreme Federal Govern- 
ment prevail."' Well, the two did come in conflict, and we Union men, like trained 
soldiers, obeyed orders. 

We took our State at her word. When she brought herself in contact with the 
Federal Government, we did exactly what she told us to do — recognized the latter as 
supreme, and herself as subordinate. Is this treason? If so, " make the most of it." 
Aaain, our State expressly covenanted v.'ith her sister States that this matchless in- 
strument should never be altered, save by the assent of three-fourths of all the States. 
Not an i was to be dotted, nor a < to be crossed, but by the concurrent stipulation of 
three-fourths of the States; and a wise provision was it. It had been framed under 
circumstances the most auspicious, with a light beaming bright from the failure of ^he 
old Confederation. It had emanated from matchless wisdom ; from the wisest heads 
and the purest hearts ever brought to think and to feel for human affairs. Ko won- 
der, then, it was provided, in the instrument itself, that it should not 'be a bandied 
thing of change, but remain in all its glory and vigor, until its defects should become 
so manifest as to bring three-fourths of the States to the conviction that it needed 
amendment. Now, having agreed that three-fourths of the ratifying parties should 
alone change its provisions, hovr can Virginia claim, of her own separate will and act, 
to change it in any regard, much less destroy it altogether ? Is not secession a change 
of the Constitution, and a change in the most vital particular? By what authority, 
then, can Virginia, herself wanting the power to alter the Constitution in the slightest 
respect, command hersons to submit to alterations not agreed o\i by the constitutional 
majority of three-fourths? 

But a State, (say the secessionists,) acting in convention, is put Upon her sover- 
eignty, and that this putting of her upon her 'sovereign powers makes secession legal 
and right-^overrules the supreme law of the Union. Immoral doctrine, fellow-citi- 
zens 1 Does the formality of a convention make lawful that which was unlawful 
before? Does the mere going into convention relieve a State of her solemn obliga- 
tions? Does it wipe out the siu of broken pledges and violated faith? Besides, is 
any State sovereign? 

State sovereignty, gentlemen, under our system, is an outspeaking absurdity. The 
idea is stupidity's self. Virginia could not coin a copper cent, nor a silver dime. She 
could not declare war, nor raise an army, nor maintain a navy, nor lay an impost 
duty, nor establish a post road. These, atod many other sovereign attributes, she 
surrendered to the Federal Government for the common good, and with the express 
understanding that there should be no alteration of the sj'Stem, no addition to or 
subtraction from it, except by the concurrent act of three-fourths of her sister States. 
And yet, this absurd pretension of absolute State sovereignty, this airy myth, has 
been the false light held up by demagogues and politicians to mislead the honest 



taasses, and which has led more thousands to the bog of disunion than any other 
ignis fatuus of the day! We, then, who have clung to the Federal Union, against our 
State, have not been disloyal to that ^tate — have committed no ,trei)ipou against her, 
no rebellion against her government and laws — and so no part of the responsibility 
of this wicked rebellion is upon us. 

And we Union men have the proud consolation that the position loe stand on is the 
position on which every great and distinguished Virginian has stood, save one. Our 
secession friends can point to only one great man to justify their madness, and that 
one is Littleton Waller Tazewell, a great mind, truly, but one, like Mr. Calhoun's, 
misled by too many vagaries to deal rightly with the practical affairs of human gov- 
ernment. Governor Tazewell, with his truth-distorting powers, was with them. 
The great and good Washington was with us. Old Ben. Franklin, the sage, philos- 
opher, and statesman, was with us. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, 
whose, master hand, more than any other, fashioned the great work, was with us. 
John Marshall, America's Mansfield and CATO,of Utica, the cloudless light of whose 
luminous mind ever made truth's pathway clear, was with us. Patrick Henry, lib- 
erty's thunderer in revolutionary timesj was with us. Spencer Roake. the first Vir- 
ginia jurist of his day, and a IState rights man of the straightest sect, was with us. 
John Taylor, of Carolina, the strictest construer of all construers, was with us. And 
all the prominent jurists of other States, the Kents, and Stokys, and Waynes, and 
Catkons, and McLeans, and Douglases, and Reverdy Johnsons, all, all are on our 
side. All these and many more of our eminent legal men, "too tedious to mention," 
have declared it as their opinion that separate State secession is not only illegal and 
unconstitutional, but treasonable; and Thomas Ritchie, the great Democratic ex- 
pounder of his time, who gave law to the State-rights Democracy, who ever and anon 
held up State rights to his followers as their guide and Shiloh, even he denounced 
secession as treason, " treason to all intents and purposes." Now, if you and I, fellow 
citizens, who refused to pull down and tear up that glorious ensign of power and 
glory, the stars and stripes, are traitors, so were Washington, and Henry, and Madi- 
son, and Franklin, and Marshall, and Judge Roane, and John Taylor, and Kent, 
and Story, and last, though not least, Mr. Ritchie. If we are traitors, we are in good 
company — better company, by a thousand-fold, than that of Jeff. Davis, and Toombs, 
and the Rhbtts, and Cobb, and Iverson, and Benjamin, and Slidell, and Keitt, and 
Pickens, and the pigmier secessionists who have dared " rush in where angels fear 
to tread," and whom folly, or infatuation, or madness, or unhallowed ambition, or 
some other false principle or motive, has impelled to the infamous work of breaking 
down that ever-precious Government which was wisdom's chiefest contrivance, and 
freedom's noblegt boast— the Constitution of the United States, and the unmatched 
Union it created. Stand firm, then, my Union friends of Portsmouth. You are in 
the best of company. You are in the right, and God is with the right. Stand by the 
stars and stripes, now and forever. Nail the Union colors to the mast, and if the 
Union ship must sink, let it go down, as the ship Cumberland did, a short time since 
in Hampton Roads, with tlfe American ensign streaming above the sinking hulk. 

The Southern secessionists have also appealed to us to go with our State into 
secession, because of the insufferable wrongs the North has done us. We are ground 
into dust, (they say.) We have not a right left, (they declare,) and they appeal to us all 
to quit our peaceful vocations and our happy homes to go forth to the battle field, and 
lay low the wicked Yankees who have dared to trample upon Southern rights. Well, 



whiit's the wrong, where is the aggression? T call upon you, one and all, and par- 
ticularly any secessionist, if there be one here, to tell me what we are now fighting 
for. So Iielp me God, I do not know. I waRt information. I know well enough 
what the Northern people are fighting for. They beard the great bell Roland toll. 
They saw the proclamation of President Lincoln, summoning them to patriots' work, 
and they rushed down to vindicate the authority of the Supreme Government, and to 
preserve the best Government on God's green earth ; to restore the ancient Union ; to 
keep the stars and stripes afloat. I can well conceive how our Northern brethren and 
nur Western brethren have come, legion upon legion, to the camp and the battle 
ground ; but I have never been informed, and 1 have never been able to perceive, why 
it is that the Soulh has become involved in this deplorable conflict. What aggression 
has been perpetrated, by this so hated Federal Government, upon the rights of the 
South? The United States have a statute book, and there is written down in it each 
and every one of its laws. Now, let any secessionist, or any man else, take up this 
statute book, and point me to the statute which has hurt the hair of the head of any 
Southern man, woman, or child? There is no such statute there. The much-abused 
and uiuch-hated North has put no such statute there. And not only has the Federal 
Government done us no practical wrong, but I aver that it has been to the South the 
kindest Government that ever a people had. If I had been always kind to you, my 
old friend Storks, (addressing an old friend and neighbor from his county,) and had 
granted you this favor and that, and this request and that, and done for you all that 
vou asked, would you not regard me as a kind sort of somebody, as a friend? ("I 
would,'" responded Mr. Stores.) Well, just so it was with the Federal Government 
and the South. All that the latter asked — no matter what — it got. In 1793, it asked 
tor a fugitive slave law, to recover their slaves escaping into the free States, and the 
North said: "Yes, you are entitled to this law, of constitutional right, and you shall 
have it." And so we got it. But in the course of time this law of 1793 was found 
ineffectual, and the South said to the North— the Federal Government — " Give us a 
better fugitive slave law, one more stringent in its provisions, one that will more 
effectually protect our slave property." And the North said — "You shall have it." 
And they not only accorded it, but the drafting of the law was left to a Southern 
Senator, James M. Mason, of Virginia; so that if the fugitive slave law of 1850 was 
not a good law, it was the fault of a Southern man, Mr. Mason. Again, in 1820, we 
made a bargain, usually called the Missouri Compromise, and the South was so tickled 
with it that every Southern Senator voted for it, and nearly every Southern member 
of the House of Representatives, while the North, though grumbling and surly, in a 
spirit of compromise and peace, assented. But we of the South, when party politics 
ran high, got tired of our bargain of 1820, and we said to the Federal Congress— oZza* 
the North — " Break up this old bargain; though we liked it at first, we don't like it 
now, in this year. Anno Domini 1850; so make a new bargain with us, in lieu of the 
old compromise of 1820." And the Federal Government — this unparental Federal 
Government, as the Southern people term it— again took us at our word, abrogated 
the old compromise, made a new bargain, a"bolished the old Missouri Compromise, 
and gave us the Kansas- Nebraska act, which threw to the winds the once vaunted, 
but afterwards contemned compromise of 1820. In a word, they gave us all we asked, 
yielded to every exaction, and if they have ever refused us aught, I know it not. I 
repeat, then, that this unholy war has been commenced, and to this hour has been 
carried on, without the sliohtest necessity. There was no more need for it, so far as 



Southern rights were concerned, than there is that one of you should this moment rise 
up h?re and stab me to the heart. 

And we were um-.pproachably safe We had all the security we could ask of God 
or man. We were far out of harm s way We had, when Mr. Lincoln was elected, a 
majority of twenty-one in one House of Congress — afterwards increased to twenty- 
iive — and of six in the other. What had we to fear? With these controlling major- 
ities, how could a law ever have been passed inimical to Southern rights? Take an 
illustration : A short time since a bill passed both houses of Congress abolishing 
slavery in the District of Columbia — a law affecting the interests, mo]-e or less, of 
every slaveholder in the South. Could this bill have become a law if the seceded 
States had kept in the Union, and maintained this majority of twenty-five in one 
House and six in the other? Besides, we had the Supreme Court upon our side. Its 
rulings had all the time leaned to the rights of the slaveholder. Then we were, at 
the time secession threw its dark shadow upon us, impregnably secure. We were 
behind the ramparts of a fortification which could neither be shelled nor battered 
down. All the abolition artillery of the earth would have been as impotent upon its 
impenetrable walls as were the rebel balls of the Merrimac upon the dentless turret of 
the Monitor. But we of the South did what? Why, we opened wide the doors of the 
fortification, and let the enemy in to take quiet possession. Whom can we blame but 
ourselves? Whom but the seceding States? And if by opening the gateways of their 
otherwise impregnable fortress, they are made the sufferers, on whose shoulders rests 
the harm — on ours, the I nion men, or on theirs, the seceders? 

But the institution of slavery (argued the disunionists) is unsafe in the Union, and 
all good and true Southern men musically to Secession to make it safer. Though 
the Constitution does for slave property what it does not for any other species of 
property whatsoever — throws around it the aegis of a special protection — and though 
the Federal legislature had recognized the obligation to grant it protection, as in 
the payment for the slaves of the Creole and those taken by the British in the war 
of 1812, we were invited to secession to put up more props to sustain the institution. 
True, we had under our beneficent Union a pillar here and a pillar there, and yet 
there and there again, to uphold the fabric. But we want more pillars yet, (said the 
secessionists,) to hold up and make stronger this great basis of Southern institutions. 
Well, how has it turned out? Slavery has been struck a blow from which it may 
never recover. If peace be made forthwith, the Southern monopoly of the cotton 
production may be maintained, and some of the rank antagonisms of slavery now 
striking at its vitals, or sharpening their fangs for a more deadly assault, may be 
propitiated, and the institution rescued from destruction. But delay in pacific 
arrangement will be absolutely fatal to slavery On this point I shall not enlarge ; 
but let us enter into a practical consideration and estimate with our secession an- 
tagonists. How is it with the value of slave property, and the security of it, under 
secession and the Union, comparatively? I wi.l illustrate by an argument I used in 
the county of Northampton, when, in a late canvas*, T was seeking a seat in Congress. 
I appealed to the people present to tell me what a likely young negro man would 
then bring for cash. I was answered, " Not more than two hundred and fifty dol- 
lars." What would such a negro slave have brought before the passage of the Vir- 
ginia secession ordinance? " From seventeen hundred and fifty dollars to two thou- 
sand dollars," was the reply. Then, said I, here is the arithmetical result : in the 
happy hours of the Union you could get seventeen hundred and fifty dollars for your 



8 

slave, and now, in secession's honr, you can get only two hundred and fifty — ^just one 
seventh of what you could have obtained in those blessed hours when the stars and 
stripes waved over an undisraembered land ! A loss, (said I,) of just fifteen hundred 
dollars on each likely slave ! Now give me, I continued, the number of likely slaves 
in your county, and I will tell you, in figures, what the people of Northampton have 
lost, by secession, in this single item of slaves. Multiply that number by 1500, and 
you have it. Figure it up when you will, you will find that while you were striving, 
by secession, to have your slave property maintained at its old value, you have already 
lost several millions of dollars in slave property alone 1 And as to the matter of 
safety, how is it ? In the blessed days of the Union you rarely lost a slave, because, 
if your slave escaped, he was delivered back to you under the fugitive slave law. 
But how is it now, in secession's reign ? Let, (said I,) the eighteen slaves captured 
just on the Maryland line, and bfought back to their owners here, this moi-ning, let 
the bills before Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and to eman- 
cipate nearly all the slaves in the South, answer my question, whether slavery was 
safer under the blessed auspices of the Union, or under the ruinous ascendancy of se- 
cession. 

And I propound the inquiry to you, men of Portsmouth, here, to-day, when was 
your slave property the more valuable, and the safer — in Union's hour or secession's 
hour? There is not one of you that does not know and feel that your hour of safety 
was the hour of the Union. The loss of a slave was a rarity, and what you did lose 
was but a drop in the ocean — not the twentieth part, in proportion, of the annual loss 
of the Virginia drovers in driving beeves to market. See, then, the delusion of our 
fellow-citizens of the South in rushing into secessien to save their slave property. Oh, 
fatal mistake ! 

And here I submit one more arithmetical view. Virginia, by the late census, lost, 
in 1860, 117 slaves, as fugitives. Put down the average value at $1,000 each (which 
is most liberal,) and all the loss we have by fugitive slaves, in one year, is $117,000. 
Losing, in this way, only $117,000 per year, we sought to make the annual loss less, 
and have we not " put our foot into it?" 

Let us have the figures. Annual loss, under the Union, $117,000. Per contra. Oh, 
what shall it be? what, really, is it? I shudder to strike the balance. Virginia's 
share of the confederate debt cannot be less, at this moment, than fifty millions. I 
believe it to be far more. Her expenditure on her own State account cannot be short 
of twenty millions — total, seventy miilions : a sum which would pay for her loss by 
fugitive slaves for near six hundred years to come ! Or, in the light of annual in- 
terest, at 7 per cent, a tax of $4,900,000 per annum on the people, to avoid an an- 
nual loss of $117,000. If the war lasts two years, it will be a tax upon the people 
of $9,800,000 per year, to save $117,000 per year. And so on, if the war should 
last five years, the people of Virgiuia, to save $117,000 per annum, will find them- 
selves borne down by a public debt which would not leave a morsel of bread to their 
starving families, and which no people on earth could endure. Add the next items, 
the numerous millions we shall have lost by the prostration of our once great sys- 
tem of internal improvements, and our incalculable loss in production and trade, 
and the balance against us is terrific. And when we come to take into the estimate 
the agonized bosoms which have been wrung by tliis deplorable conflict — the widowed 
wives it shall have made — the sonless fathers and mothers — the brotherless sisters — 
the orphaned children — thp ruptured ties in all the sweet relations of life — the 



9 • 

desolation, physical and social — the personal erabitterment and undying hates — the 
want and suffering — the streaming blood and gaping wounds, and the grief and 
wailing, which have come of this accursed rebellion : I say when we come to bring 
all these items into the dark account, how insignificant becomes that little amount of 
$117,000, compared with that terrible aggregate of taxation, ruin, and woe, which 
bears down the other side of the account? Billions, not millions, will denote the 
fearful balance. Had we not far better have lost five hundred, or even one thousand 
slaves ayear, than to have brought these woes unnumbered, these appalling ills, upon 
the people of our State ! 

And suppose — what is not impossible, I fear not improbable — that in the effort, by 
secession, to make slavery stronger, the institution perish altogether by the antagon- 
isms it has aroused — by a law of general emancipation, for example: wljy, we lose 
altogether the very property we designed to have better protected ; we shall have 
lost forever four hundred millions' worth of slave property; and we shall have 
among us and around us half a million of slaves, who will either cut our throats, or 
have their own throats cut by us, to save ourselves, our wives, and our children 1 

Such, my friends, is the result of the efforts of those who would allure you to se- 
cession, to make slavery safer. Here is the feast to which you have been invited. 
Oh ! how strange the infatuation ! Thank heaven, you and J have had no part uor 
lot in the matter. And I tell our deluded countrymen of the South that they can 
rescue the institution of slavery in but one way. They must come once more under 
those stars and stripes which protect all they float above. They must fall down and 
worship once again at the altars of the Union, and vowing repentance there, bring 
themselves back within that blessed Union which has proved heretofore adequate, 
and which hereafter, when restoration comes, will continue to be adequate, to protect 
them and all their institutions, of whatever kind. Let them put up the fallen columns 
of the Union they have pulled down, and they will have put up the pillars that sus- 
tain the institution of slavery, not before. In truth, th& South has always had a far 
more peculiar interest than the North in the maintenance of the Union, because, by 
it, a very peculiar institution is peculiarly cared for and protected ; and so it is the 
highest interest of the seceded States to hasten back, with double-quick speed, to 
that asylum of their peculiar institution — the Union of old. 

But I hear it said that, though up to the time of Mr. Lincoln's election the Federal 
Government had done us no wrong, it has since shown a purpose to convert the war 
from a war for the Union into a war for emancipation. But whose fault is it, if it be 
so? Who put it in the power of Congress to change the war for the Union to one 
for the abolition of slavery? The Southern people themselves— the seceding States. 
Had they stayed in, could we have ever had an Abolition Congress ? And are we to 
make no allowance for the present exasperation of the North ? For one, I do not 
wonder at it. The North had done us no wrong but to talk abolition, which hurts 
nobody, and which ought to sca^e nobody ; and to take the man of their choice for 
President, which, surely, in a democratic government, is no very great offense. It 
had been kind and forbearing to us ; had even agreed so to amend the Constitution 
as to put slavery in the States forever beyond the reach of Federal legislation ; and 
when without cause, we have involved them in a consuming debt, to last for ages to 
come, and prostrated their flourishing industry, and poisoned the fountains of their 
social happiness, we ought to expect embitterment and resentment in return. I don't 
advise revenge. I would rather conjure them to be generous vet ; to forgive and to 

2 • 



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,10 

forget ; to remember that hundreds of thousands of the plain masses in the South 
have been deceived or coerced into the rebellion, and are in heart guiltless of treason ; 
to forbear all extreme measures ; above all things to let slavery alone ; to keep the 
pledges they have so often made to maintain honestly the original aims and character 
of the war — the preservation of the Government, the enforcement of the laws, and the 
restoration of the Union. If this be done, (and I entreat them to do it,) reconstruction 
may yet take place; a potent Union sentiment may yet arise in the South ; and the 
star-gemmed banner of the Union wave once, more over an undivided and happy 
country. Yet, come whatever results may, we, the Union men, are not responsible ; 
the secessionists are ; and they must take the consequences of their folly. And if not 
a Southern slave be left, they will deserve no sympathy. On the contrary, their guilt 
of heinous treason will be aggravated, many fold, by the heartless inhumanity of drag- 
ging along the guilty and the innocent to a common destruction. Why — will you tell 
me, fellow-citizens of Portsmouth — why did not the seceded States accept the North- 
ern proposition to put slavery in the States forever beyond the jurisdiction of Federal 
power? Alas! was there not a malicious, foregone purpose to break up the Union? 
. And now to a few practical views in conclusion : You are in this war (this twenty 
years' war promised you by Jeff. Davis,) and you know and feel what it is ; do you 
not ? Are you as happy as you were under the Union of your fathers ? Have you as 
much bread and meat for your wives and children as you used to have ? Have you 
employment, as you had under the Union ? Does the hard-fisted mechanic, whose 
chief property is the sinewy arms his God has given him, go to his workshop daily, 
as he was wont to do? Are your wives and daughters clad with the handsome 
calicoes and plain silks that once decked and made comfortable their persons ? Did 
you pay, under the Union, one dollar per pound for coffee, and forty cents fur sugar, 
and seven dollars per pound for tea, and seventy-five cents per yard for ninepence 
calico, as you now do in these hard times of secession ? (A voice in the crowd — 
" We don't have coffee, we use parched corn.") Oh, yes ; then, in the blessed hours 
of the Union, you had coffee at 12 cents per pound, and now, in secession's reign, you 
have parched corn in the place of that luxury alike of rich people and poor people — 
coffee. I pity you from my heart, for I love the beverage, but would not like to quaff 
it at the secession price of a dollar a pound. But to proceed : are your wives as 
happy, or your children? Do not your wives tremble and your children start when 
gathered at night around the once happy hearth and fireside ? Are you not, many of 
of you, awaiting every hour painful tidings from the battle-field of fratricidal war? 
Are you not hourly expecting to see some husband, or father, or brother, or nephew, 
borne a crippled or a dead body from the gory field ? This is your experience, as it 
is of us all, of this deplorable war. Then what are you to do ? (A voice — '' Hang the 
secessionists.") Well, I have no objection to that, so far as the leaders are concerned. 
Jefferson Davis, and^ Robert Toombs, and Barnwell Rhett, and Wm. L. Yancey, 
and Howell Cobb, and Mason, and Slidell, and Benjamin — I am not sure I might not 
put in James Buchanan — and the guilty traitors who fomented and nursed this abom- 
inable rebellion, and essayed, for selfish considerations and without any earthly cause, 
lo tumble into fragments the noblest fabric of government ever reared by man, and who 
have deceived and misled to their ruin the common people, who have no time to think 
of political afTairs, and a large portion of whom cannot even read or write — such men, 
I say, who know better, ought to be hanged — not the deceived and innocent masses; 
iind this war will be without its moial unk'ss example be made of tlies-c wicked fore- 



11 

men in a nation's ruin. The Federal Government must, before this great fray ends, 
demonstrate to all the world not only its ability to put down treason and rebellion 
but the will and the determination to punish traitors and rebels; for without these 
admonitory lessons, treason and rebellion may rise up at any hour to disturb the 
national peace, and to shake the foundations of society. And I thank God that the 
Constitution has defined treason, and the law provided the death penalty for the 
crime. I would not only be willing to see these wicked leaders hanged by the neck 
until they are dead, dead, dead, but would stretch the Constitution to the utmost 
legal tension to find the power to confiscate every dollar's worth of their earthly 
possessions : 

" Let them not live to taste this laud's inciease. 
That would with treason wound this lair land's peace." 

I repeat, what are you to do? You must put an end to the war. If you stand in 
the mire, will you not sink deeper and deeper into it the longer you stand? Just so 
it is with this war. The longer you stay in it, the deeper will you sink into the mire 
of its troubles, and miseries, and desolations ; so get out of it, and as soon as you can; 
the sooner you get out of it, the sooner you will have good coffee in the place of 
parched corn ; the sooner you will get rid of the war prices of $7 per pound for tea, 
and 40 cents per pound for sugar, and VS cents per yard for ninepence calico; the 
sooner will you get employment, and with employment money, and with money an 
abundance of meat and bread, aye, and whisky, too, if any want it, instead of the 
stinted allowance this war has put you upon; and thesoouei' will separated fathers, and 
mothers, and sons, and husbands, and wives, and brothers, and sisters, meet in happy 
gathering around the hearthstone of home. And one reason ought to be conclusive 
with you, and secessionists too — the South cannot win in this contest. It can never 
establish its independence. The odds are too strong against it. We of the South 
have seven millions of white men to twenty millions against us. In the nature of 
things, we cannot overcome this vast superiority in the great material of war — men. 
We started in the war, I know, with the absurd notion that one Southern man was equal, 
in battle, to five Northern men , but I presume that delusion is now well cleared up. 
We hugged that other delusion that Northern men would not fight, and 1 presume 
this hallucination has also passed away. The " cursed Yankees," to use Di.xie's par- 
lance, will not fight duels, and in that they show their good sense. But put them to 
fighting for a principle — for the stars and stripes, for example — and they will fight as 
hard as any people on earth. And look, too, at the spirit now exhibiting on the 
second call upon the North for troops. Legion after legion is rushing down to the 
battle place, resolved, at all hazards, to maintain the Government, and fling again 
to the breeze the glorious stars and stripes, all over the land. 

The spirit of twenty millions of such men is not to be resisted. Besides, the South 
wants all the elements of successful warfare. It wants even powder. It wants heavj- 
artillery, the great instrumentality of modern v/arfare — that instrumentality which, 
Napoleon said, God Almighty was always on the side of. It w;ints the great essen- 
tials of commerce and manufactures. It wants tlie woolen clothing to keep the sol- 
dier's limbs warm, and the shoes to protect his feet from the lacerating tread. Want- 
ing both commerce and manufactures, it has no hoarded millions of excess cash to 
draw upon for the necessities of war. About ten isillions of loan was all it could 
rake and scrape from the chests of its capitalists. The result is, that while the Fede- 
ral Government has unlimited credit, the Confederate Wtates have none. Thev 



12 

have even to legislate their worthless puper issues into currencj\ Men take it by 
compulsion only. . Patriotism virill not teke it at par. I know the fact that a lady of 
Norfolk sent a twenty-dollar gold piece to Richmond, and got for it thirty-three dol- 
lars in Confederate notes, a discount on the latter of sixty-Sve per cent. Now, when 
the Confederate currency shall have settled down to this r<xte of depreciation, how 
worthless will it be for carrying on a great war? The South has no navy, and can 
get none ; the Federal Government, in six months, can build and equip any number 
of ships it needs. And above all, it wants bread and meat, and will want them more 
and more as the war progresses ; for with the whole Mississippi river and valley, and 
most of the railroads, in Federal possession, it is cut off from the supplies required for 
carrying on the vfur. Unless, therefore, an army can subsist without bread, success can 
never perch on the Confederate banner. The hope, too* of foreign intervention, is 
blasted. The opening of the ports of New Orleans and other Southern cities, opens 
to France and England supplies of cotton, and so these nations have lost all induce- 
ment to interfere in our quarrels. And we have another greater strength. We have 
a just cause to fight for. We are fighting to save the best Government known to men. 
We are fighting for Washington's Union, and we are fighting for principles which 
Washington, in his parting counsels, gave us in charge. We are repelling aggression. 
We are defending ourselves from war, actually and wickedly waged upon us — not a 
war of our making. It is loyalty struggling with treason. In such a cause, the God 
of nations and of battles will help us as He did our fathers. He will give us the vic- 
tory. So help me Heaven, fellow citizens, one reason why I could not and would not 
participate in this unnecessary and heartless rebellion, is, that I have believed in my 
soul that the God of justice and right could prosper no such cause as that which the 
seceding States are engaged in. Besides, there is an old saying that " tjie proof of the 
pudding is in the eating thereof," and let the secessionists take warning from the 
adage. They have been defeated in every important engagement, save one, though 
the masses of the Southern people are still kept in the dark, and made to believe 
that the South has won all the battles. Why, some of the secessionists here- 
abouts have faced me down to the last that we, the Federals, the stars-and-stripes 
men, have been whipped in every fight. They were quizzing me, I suppose, not re- 
membering that I sometimes read the papers. Or it may be a part of a system of 
deception resorted to to keep up the drooping spirits of the Confederates, and holding 
them to the fighting mood by the tempting assurance that, as they have been victo- 
rious in every trial of strength, ultimate triumph for their cause is sure. Most cruel 
deception ! Heartless pretext — is it not? — that allures the innocent and unsuspecting 
to the butchery of the battle field ! 

I repeat, the South has lost every important engagement. The Federal arms have 
re-taken nearly every lost fort. We have New Orleans, and', with it, the whole valley 
of the Mississippi. We can augment the Union army to two millions of men, if need 
be, and I solemnly believe that if the North were left out of the fight altogether, 
the western men alone could put down the rebellion. I repeat, the South cannot 
win. If it persist, extermination is the only victory it can conquer. In naked 
truth, you had as well call on me to thrash this large crowd of stalwart men, or upon 
the puny youngster to take down the brawny giant, as to expect the Confederate 
States of America to wrestle with the giant power of the United States. I say, then, 
get out of this horrible war as best you can, and you can best do that by striving 
for and ref^urning to that ble.;sed Union under whose elevating auspices our country 



hag grown in a brief space to be among the mightiest of the nations of the earth, and 
under which you, and I, and all the people of the United States have been the hap- 
piest that ever God's sun sent down his rajs upon. Speak out for the Union. Be 
not afraid. Fear not, as some do, that the Confederate troops will again possess 
Norfolk. No danger of that ; none whatever. The Confederate flag can never be 
flung out again over Norfolk and Portsmouth. No ! 1 would as soon expect 
the Monitor or Galena to be used up by a half-ton fishing smack as that Norfolk 
should be re-taken by the Confederate arms. Federal possession once obtained, there 
is no power in the South to oust it. You are once more, thank God, under the pro- 
tecting folds of the Star-Spangled Banner, and if your hearts yearn towards the 
Union of your fathers, speak o.ut your sentiments like men and like freemen. Don't 
hide your light under a bushel. Let it shine out, and it may leefd others into the 
path of right and duty. Your example may encourage the weak and confirm the 
wavering. If you don't plant a nucleus here and a nucleus there, as our fathers did 
in the Revolution, you may never reach peace and the old Union. 

Do not allow yourselves, I beseech you, to be misled by the fallacy, honest, no doubt, 
with a few, that the people of Virginia should do nothing, make no move, until a new 
convention of the people shall have sent her back to the Union. No mistake could be 
more fatal. It is but a knocking under to secession. It is an acknowledgment of the 
doctrine of secession in its worst form. It keeps it in life, and decks it ofi' with the 
garniture of legality and right. It postpones indefinitely all Union demonstration 
, and action. I say, let not this fallacy keep you back. The government of our State 
must be, necessarily, for some time, chiefly a military one. In the meantime, let the 
voice of the Union men be heard loud and strong ; and when, by the general speaking 
out of the Union men, it shall be found that they are strong to save, there will be no 
difficulty in making the arrangements for restoring the State to her position in the 
Union. Let your present efforts look to the expression and development of the Union 
sentiment ; details will follow. 

And be not deceived by the gulling pretence raised by the Confederate leaders and 
presses, that the Federal Government has made war upon your State. It is not true 
and none know it better than Jefferson Davis, and Robert Toombs, and Howell 
Cobb. Mr. Lincoln issued his proclamation on the 15th of April, calling out the 
militia, but for what? To make war upon Virginia? No ; but to " see that the laws 
were faithfully executed," and to save the Government he was sworn to maintain. He 
did so under express authority of law — of law as old as the Government. He did just 
what Washington did at the time of the Whisky Insurrection — called out the military 
to put down rebellion. He did just what Andrew Jackson did when South Carolina 
put herself in opposition to the supreme law of the Union, or what he would have 
done if this mischief-making State had not dropped her defiance and mended her 
behavior. He had •no alternative left him. Several States had seceded, in other 
words, had put the laws of the United States under foot; the forts, and guns, and 
munitions of war, and money, and other property of the United States, had been seized 
by the Confederate States ; the raising of an army had been provided for by the Con- 
federate Congress more than a month before the issue of the proclamation ; Fort 
Sumter had been bombarded — an act of actual war — three days before the date of the 
proclamation ; and, elated by the grand exploit of capturing a weak fort, garri 
soned by only seventy ;iien, the Confederate leaders had threatened the capital. Was 
the calling out of the militia, under such circumstances, an act of war upon Virginia"'' 



M. 



14 

No; Virginia herself made war upon the United States. That is God's truth. Sh» 
was the aggressor. On the 30th of March, 1861, sixteen days before the proclamation 
appeared, she took by force the guns of the United States at Bellona Arsenal, an act 
of undisguised war ; for if the taking by one government of the property of another 
be not an act of war, in God's name, what is? On the iTth of April, Gov. Letcher 
ordered the channel of the Elizabeth river — a river of the United States, not of Vir- 
ginia — to be obstructed. The United States post offices, and custom houses, and navy 
yard, were taken, and troops ordered out by the Executive of Virginia to resist the 
Federal authority, before a Federal soldier had trod the soil of Virginia. And on the 
24th of April — a month before the advance of a Federal army into Virginia — the State 
had become a member of the Southern Confederacy, by. which act she became a party 
to the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and all the other acts of war of the Confederate 
States. Who, then, began the war? Virginia surely began it upon the United States. 
The United States is but defending itself from her war, and the war of her rebel 
associates, and the President would have been himself a traitor if he had not called 
out the military. 

And so, be not thrown off your balance by the artful appeal ever and anon ad- 
dressed to your State pride, that the "sacred soil" of Virginia has been polluted by 
Federal invasion. Under the laws and Constitution of the United States, the Presi- 
dent, as Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy, has the power to march the 
Federal troops over every foot of the territory of each and every one o^ the States. 
It is an inevitable deduction from the war-making power, which is vested in the 
Congress, and not in the separate States. The Federal Government would not be worth 
tenpence, would be no government at all, were it otherwise. The idea that the 
Federal Executive is bound to see the laws executed all-over the Union, aud yet not 
possess the power to march the Federal troops all-over the Union to execute them, 
is an absurdity which could originate only in the inventive brain of secession. 

And, lastly, be not "frightened out of your propriety" by the bug-bear conception 
of Confederate treason, that the object of this war is the subjugation of the South, 
or the emancipation of the slaves. The war did not so begin ; let us hope that it will 
end as it began — in an honest endeavor to execute the laws and restore the Union. 
You have the solemn declaration of President Lincoln, and of the dominant party in 
Congress, that this shall not be a war of subjugation or emancipation. Let us hold 
them to this pledge ; and I have great confidence that Mr. Lincoln will do what he 
promises. And the sooner we end the war, the more will they.be enabled to redeem 
the pledge. The sooner we end the war, the sooner shall we escape the yawning gulf 
of "militai-y necessity," and we shall the soonest end the war by the fearless and 
out-spoken expression of the Union sentiment, which, being thus expressed, will let 
the Confederate leaders know that there is a division in the South, and that the 
people — the masses — the bone and sinew — are entitled to a say in«the matter of termi- 
nating the war, and are resolved to assert their power. I tell you, people of Ports- 
mouth, in conclusion, that the disunion leaders will not yield until the masses rise up 
and force them, and that, if you desire to come back to the Union as it was, and to 
maintain the Constitution as your fathers made it, you must speak out your Union 
sentiments at once, and at the top of your voice. You have not an hour to lose I 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




